Undocumented stories

She is fighting to regain her composure and she is losing. Her narrative halts in midsentence, stalled in a sob, and Lourdes Solorzano's previously calm, confident face disintegrates into a portrait of plain heartache. Her red T-shirt is rhinestoned with the American flag, and she raises it over her mouth in an awkward, embarrassed effort to hide her pain.

Her baby was just two months old, Solorzano finally says, the last time she saw her. That baby, raised by Solorzano's parents, is a 16-year-old young woman now. In all those long years of telephone calls and re-reading letters from home, watching a daughter grow up at a distance in the changing faces and poses of school portraits or Christmas snapshots, why had she never returned to her native Honduras to see her? "Tengo miedo," Solorzano says, brushing two quickly falling tears away with the back of her hand. "I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get back in."

Solorzano's is a tiny, tragic fragment of the United States' immigrant "problem." The painful separation she has endured has been repeated by countless other immigrant families. After struggling to find a way in, they cannot go back, and without the right documentation, they cannot move forward to a full life in the United States.

Though still below historic highs in terms of total population percentage, in sheer numbers America's foreign-born population has exploded in recent years-from 8 million in 1990 to almost 36 million in 2004. Of that figure as many as 13 million are living in the U.S. illegally, in violation of their visas or work permits, or just sin papeles, without any documentation at all.

In recent months, many in the community of undocumented people have come out of the shadows in marches seeking a rational transition to legal residency and citizenship. They have long been supported by the U.S. Catholic Church, which describes the current immigration system as "broken" and calls on legislators to create more generous immigration policies so families can be reunited and people living for years in legal limbo-fearful to seek redress of wrongs, press employers for just wages, even to seek medical care when they need it-can become full participants in American society.

But efforts on behalf of the rights and dignity of undocumented migrants into the U.S. have produced a backlash. Many Americans have responded to the newfound assertiveness among undocumented people by calling for more punitive measures against them and those who support them. Many propose tighter immigration controls, including a larger military presence and more imposing physical barriers along the U.S. border with Mexico, where almost 60 percent of the undocumented migrants originate.

But they don't all come from Mexico. In the Flatrock neighborhood of South Nashville, where Native Americans once met for parleys with English settlers-the pesky, undocumented immigrants of their time-Catholic Charities' Latino Services office is a veritable United Nations. Here is a Colombian, there a Panamanian, an Argentine, all crowded into this small office seeking help getting a driver's license, negotiating a lease, fighting for back wages, and, for almost all of them, some kind of path to citizenship.

That's what brought Solorzano here today carrying her newborn son, drowsing in a car seat. She tells how she and her husband left Honduras to escape its life-draining poverty and a criminal gang that had taken over their village, how they came to the U.S. to build a better life for themselves and their children, as so many immigrants like them will tell you. The Solorzanos are part of a mass migration of Latinos to a region that just a few years ago could have corralled a good percentage of its immigrant population into a downtown honky tonk.

Tennessee's foreign-born residents, mirroring the national trend, jumped from just over 59,000 in 1990 to more than 217,000 last year. David Lubell, director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC), says most Tennesseans have handled the multicultural transition gracefully. It has only been since recent coverage of immigrant marches that he has seen any serious flare-ups between undocumented residents and the native born, a change he attributes to the overheated rhetoric of local politicians and talk-radio blowhards.

"These people wouldn't be here if we didn't need them," says Lubell. "There have been challenges that local governments are still trying to address, but they are no different from the challenges the nation faced when my ancestors came to this country."


Alien nation
Some people come to America on boats, some on 747s. Some cross a river or climb over a fence. One of Jessica Vasquez' earliest memories is as a 6-year-old ducking out of sight in the backseat of a car as she and her family crossed the border from Tijuana in 1980. Somewhere near the Illinois border, with a driver exhausted and strung out on who knows what, their car flipped and rolled, her 4-year-old brother completely thrown from the vehicle, somehow uninjured.

But when the dust had settled, the man who was transporting them had more things on his mind than her brother's miraculous escape. He hurried the family away before police arrived at the wreck. Discovery at the accident scene would have meant deportation for them all.

It was the beginning of a double life that persists to this day as Vasquez, now 27, prepares to graduate from Chicago State College. "I haven't even told some of my closest friends that I'm an ‘illegal,' " she says. "I'm embarrassed. People have so many ideas about who undocumented people are. You know, usually a landscaper or somebody working in a field. They don't think of us as students or anything else, but really we're everywhere."

Vasquez doesn't remember life in Mexico and has no close family ties there. The idea that she could be deported there is astonishing to her. "My parents brought me here when I was so little, I don't know anything about Mexico. My home is the United States, yet I'm not welcome here."

She has no credit cards, no identification. She has an I.R.S. number to pay her taxes but no Social Security number for benefits or tax credits she might be eligible to receive. When her friends were getting their driver's licenses, she was making excuses about why she couldn't be bothered. When they were applying for student loans, the National Honor Society student told them she didn't want to deal with the paperwork.

Vasquez has had to attend scattered city college classes as she could afford to pay for them out of pocket. That eight-year educational odyssey will end soon, but "when I graduate, I don't know what comes next," she says.

Her youngest sister, U.S.-born Yolanda, attends the University of Notre Dame and will not face the same struggles Jessica has endured. "I'm so proud of her," Vasquez says, "but at the same time I look at her and I can't help but think that could have been me or my brother or my other sister. I tell her take advantage of it. Don't take it for granted."

Vasquez' peculiar situation is the same one faced by at least 2 million other undocumented residents who came to the U.S. as children, who have never known a different culture, but have never been eligible for legal residency. Almost 14 million people live in "mixed families" with some immediate members, typically U.S.-born children, having citizenship or legal residency but with a parent or spouse who doesn't. These families face difficult choices and at worst a harrowing separation in the event of the arrest of an undocumented family member.

Vasquez is cautiously optimistic that recent immigration reform proposals will offer some escape from the purgatory she inhabits. Until then she will persist in this odd life, living underground in plain sight.

"I'm trying to live by the rules," she says. "I hope someday to become a teacher and eventually get my master's in public health. I want to be able to buy a house and have a fulfilling career. I want to offer my daughter a better life. You know, I want the American dream."